


Crashes

by sawbones



Series: show your dog the whip [3]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: All hurt no comfort, Consensual But Not Safe Or Sane, D/s, Impact Play, M/M, Masochism, Sadism, dom!hux, sub!Kylo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-17
Updated: 2017-06-17
Packaged: 2018-11-15 09:45:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11228406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sawbones/pseuds/sawbones
Summary: When everything dear has been forcibly taken from you, there is power in letting go.





	Crashes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SinNotAlone](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SinNotAlone/gifts).



> This is a commission for the incredibly generous and impossibly patient [sinnotalone](https://sinnotalone.tumblr.com/). It was both very difficult and very enjoyable to write. Also shout out to [kiriequick](https://kiriequick.tumblr.com/) for being a much-needed second pair of eyes on this.
> 
> I would recommend reading the prequels to this, and take heed this is not a happy story.

Hux didn’t make a habit of shadowing Kylo whether he was on his ship or off it. Regardless of their arrangement, they were both grown men with their own duties, their own responsibilities. In a machine - a beautiful, powerful, earth-shattering machine - one cog could not watch over another, no matter how vital a component it was. Hux tried to not let his personal opinion that Kylo Ren often proved to be the wrench in works rather than the gears running it affect his professional actions.

So when the time came and some sweaty-palmed Lieutenant approached him on the bridge, cap low, voice lower, to tell him there had been a serious incident on Kylo Ren’s ground mission, Hux was surprised as he was forced to swallow around a sudden, sullen lump of  _ something _ that welled up in his throat. He gestured for her to go on. She explained they had picked up a disturbance on the planet’s surface with their long range scanners, something bigger than the expected combat signatures. Something more like an explosion, though they were unable to pinpoint the source. Since then, comms chatter had been dead; there was no response to hails from the ship either, not from Kylo, his Knights, or any of the trooper escort.

With a lifetime of practice, he carefully curated his expression to one of cool neutrality and dismissed the Lieutenant. Radio silence from Kylo and his ilk was not unheard of; they could spend weeks without a whisper, coming and going as they pleased. No response from the troopers, on the other hand - that was an obvious red flag. 

He did what he needed to and followed the protocols down to the letter; he opened a radio relay, scheduled the prep and launch of an investigatory drone, and later - if required - a recovery beacon. For a brief moment he considered contacting Snoke, then immediately decided against it. It could be assumed he knew and perhaps was even already acting on it. If not, Hux was not eager to see what sort of dogs an emergency message would bring down on him. 

When it was done, Hux closed his comms and took a half-second to recheck his composure, and then when he was sure there was no fault to be found, he opened it once again and went back to the matters that demanded his attention before the Lieutenant’s interruption. Of course he did, he wouldn’t wait for Kylo. Waiting was a luxury for people who had time to waste. Hux was quite sure that until Ren was found,  _ if  _ he was found, life on the Finalizer would proceed much as it had before the dawn of the Knights of Ren - that was: a degree quieter, and with considerably less repair costs.

 

\--

 

Hux went through the same motions as he did at the end of any other day, the slow and deliberate ritual of stripping himself down and stowing all the important part of himself away for when he’d need them in the morning, boots off, shirt sleeves rolled to the elbow. His shoulders dropped for the first time since he’d left his quarters at the start of that cycle; he rolled his neck to try and ease some of the tension, but he knew it was pointless. 

Hux paused, turned his head like he was listening for something, half-expecting phantom footfalls behind him, a dramatic reveal from the shadows. There was nothing, of course. If anything, his quarters seemed even quieter than usual, lacking a looming presence. Too quiet, almost, as if he hadn’t coveted silence his entire life. Hux’s weariness only exacerbated the prickling flare of annoyance he felt at himself for leaning into fancifulness - or worse, sentimentality. It was an ugly thing, petty and unwarranted. Hux pressed his thumbs to sockets of his eyes, trying to relieve some of the pressure that was building behind them. It didn’t do much; he needed a drink, he decided. Maybe several.

He tried not to notice the faint tremor in his hands as he unstoppered his bottle of brandy, but he was forced to remember all the times Ren’s hands shook as he was ordered to pour him a glass - from anticipation, from the effort of control, but never truly from fear, not even as Hux threatened and scorned him for his gracelessness.

The glass made it halfway to his mouth before the smell of it caught the back of his throat and caused his stomach to clench unpleasantly. He sat it down hard enough to make the bottle clink and leaned against the table, both hands flat, his head bowed. He shut his eyes and gritted his teeth, and willed himself to stop this-- this whatever it was before it became something it wasn’t.

There was no release, no relief, no sudden moment of calm or understanding. Only silence. With a bitten-off cry of frustration, Hux up-ended the table.

 

\--

 

In the morning, Hux had to call a cleaning droid. He’d left the carnage he’d made lying over-night, perhaps in the thin hope it would disappear by itself; it remained an accusatory mess right where he’d left it. It felt like conceding defeat, though he wasn’t sure what against. He had always had a bias against cleaning droids, taking a small measure of satisfaction that bordered on smugness about cleaning up after himself. It was a sign of discipline, he thought, and self reliance, one that had been drilled into him ruthlessly.

The glass decanter had shattered into a hundred shards that he didn’t feel like picking up by hand. The brandy itself had soaked into the carpet, and any of the cigarettes that had tipped out of their silver case had sopped it up and were spoiled. Even the ashtray had left a trail of ash, marking the path it had cartwheeled along until it hit the far wall and shook out the rest of its contents in a smear of grey smut. 

By the end of his shift, it was all gone. The carpet was spotless. The decanter had been replaced with a simple metal bottle - water, he assumed, since there was nothing else for the droid to put in its place. The ashtray had been cleaned and put back in place, but his cigarette box was empty. There was something off about the entire room, like all the furniture had been moved one inch to the left. 

He lifted his head and his shoulders dropped. The ceiling tile that had been so gently off-set for months now, the one he had displaced in anger and Ren had put back while he hid in the refresher, had been righted. Hux would miss that more keenly than any spilled brandy.

 

\--

 

Hux had considered Phasma a friend once, but like so many things that too was lost in the destruction of Starkiller Base. She knew about his arrangement with Ren; he had told her over a game of chess, a flimsy excuse to meet up and drink and gripe at each other once a week. She would never take the offered cigarette, too proud in her body to mistreat it so, but she would drink whatever Hux put in front of her. 

She had asked him once what it was like; Hux said it was taming a nexu and having it curl up at your feet, because that’s what she wanted to hear, and at the time that’s exactly what it had felt like.

“Still no news of Ren,” she said as she lingered on the other side of Hux’s desk after dismissal with her helmet tucked under her arm. It was somehow neither a question nor a statement, a wonderfully oblique talent of hers he had always meant to learn. Hux cut his eyes at her, and to her credit she didn’t flinch. She never had. He could glean just about as much from her expression as he could if she was still wearing her helmet, but he knew what it meant: she was concerned, or mistakenly trying to curry lost favour - he liked to think she knew him better than to try the latter.

What he didn’t know was whether she was making assumptions, or if it was that apparent he was feeling the effects of Ren’s absence with a sharp-toothed keenness that left him feeling mauled. Did he not hold himself with the same iron-spined composure? Was he not still so hard-jawed and cold-eyed anywhere but the podium, where he let the fire burn with the same intensity it surely always had? Stars, he tried. Hux couldn’t decide which was more unpalatable to him at that moment; he considered admonishing Phasma out of sheer pettiness. He leant back in his chair, put his elbows on the table.

“You will know when I do, I’m sure,” he said thinly. Phasma had the good grace to take it as the absolute dismissal it was. She snapped off a crisp salute and replaced her helmet before leaving his office. The door slid shut behind her with hiss that matched Hux’s sigh. He let his head drop into his hands for just a moment, a half-hearted effort at wiping away the staticky tiredness that clung to him. He would have preferred her indifference or even her scorn - anything but fucking  _ pity _ .

 

\--

 

It had been two months since Hux had been handed the initial report on the so-called disturbance on the planet’s surface, a little more since he had last seen Ren. There had been no news, no contact. Even Snoke hadn’t contacted him in weeks; the silence was conspicuous and more than a little insulting. It shouldn’t have bothered him as much as it did - he had plans, of course, ones that stretched out for hypothetical years that had already been set in motion, but those plans had been made with fail-safes he apparently no longer had. Those plans were made with the backing of an unseen hand that no longer moved him. He felt adrift, a ship listing in the waters. He wasn’t in trouble yet but he felt like one disaster could sink the whole Order; the vague helplessness of it all was like needles on his skin.

He had lost Ren once before, or so Hux had thought; he remembered flying over the ice-bound earth as it shook itself apart, knowing he was swallowed up in it somewhere. He remembered the cutting wind that whipped through the shuttle as it struggled to take off again, watching two medics fight to keep Ren alive; the great idiot resisted at first, screaming like a wounded animal, eyes white, blood smeared on the walls. The bulkheads had creaked and groaned as he push-pulled them with his ridiculous powers, perhaps even without meaning to; the men, the few survivors they’d managed to pick out of the snow, stared at the bloody melt-water between their boots and wondered if they were going to die anyway because of him. Eventually either blood loss or sedatives made him still, lying like a broken doll on the bench on the far side of the shuttle, lips slack, arm hanging off the edge. 

Hux also remembered staring at him then, eyes fixed to his chest to catch a glimpse of a single shallow breath, wondering if he had been too late to save him - and wishing, hoping to any god or force in the universe that it was so. He had hated him then, despised him or something like it, something cold and sharp around the edges. 

He still did, even when his disappearance left Hux feeling bereft, because that was the only way Hux could think to describe it: bereft. Feeling the absence of--  _ something _ . Not yearning, not mourning, nothing so maudlin as that but deprived. Lacking. It was a nicotine craving mid-shift, the nagging hurt of a half-healed bone-deep bruise. It was a persistent but forgettable ache in his chest, easily swallowed in distraction but impossible to shake off altogether, a torment in his quiet moments. Hux hated it, resented it, resented  _ Ren _ , because even if it was so comparatively insignificant in the grand scheme of things, it was still a crack in the foundations of a well built home. The only home he had left, after Starkiller. 

Hux staunchly refused to study the nature of it further; introspection was not a talent of his, and he knew whatever it was would be as tender to the touch as a broken bone. He did what he could to flatten the ragged edges of it, to dampen it down, smooth it out. In the day cycle, he worked until he could hardly stand. In the night, he drank, he smoked, he slept when he could - and in the small spaces in between, he let himself hurt.

 

\--

 

Hux was several hours into one such evening when he felt it: a shiver of static that made the hairs on the back of his neck bristle, like a blaster bolt passing by too close. He glanced up from the datapad he wasn’t reading, too tired to properly focus on the words of some quasi-fictional account of life as a Rebel convert; he thought it might have been some electrical surge or similar, but the low lights didn’t so much as flicker. No alarms were tripped, no system warning blinked on his comms device. 

The door to his quarters opened, then closed. Hux thinned his lips, tapped his cigarette into the ashtray. He didn’t look up; he could see him there, a black phantom on the edge of his vision. He could smell the burnt ozone, feel the thin tendrils of something dark and cold reaching out to him, skimming the surface of his mind, the palm of his hand.

Hux closed his hand into a fist.

“I thought you were dead,” he said. It spilled out of him like an accusation, even if it wasn’t meant to be. Ren offered no response to that; his silence forced Hux to look at him. 

He looked different from how he remembered, diminished somehow - at first Hux thought he was intentionally trying to make himself look smaller, but then he realised his shoulders were hunched as he defensively favoured one side. He was injured. His face was badly scraped too, one eye blackened, his lip split. The wounds were relatively fresh; they’d clearly happened in the last week, and not when he’d first disappeared. Hux might have asked what had happened but he found he didn’t care; he hoped it still hurt. 

“Why did you come here?” he asked, meaning his quarters, “I didn’t call for you.”

Ren took a staggered step towards him and Hux stood up, the datapad clattering to the floor. The suddenness of it made Ren flinch, “I missed you.”

“And that is relevant how, exactly?” Hux said, and to his credit his voice was steady, edged with ice as it was, “Months. You’ve been gone for  _ months _ . You expect me to be waiting here with open arms for you?”

He couldn’t be sure Ren had even heard him; his eyes were flat, dull as he reached out to him again, both physically and with the Force. Hux curled his lip in disgust as he swatted him away; neither had ever been allowed in his quarters, not without express permission first. Hux could feel it, his need for comfort like a sucking chest wound. When he tried again, his hands skirting the edge of Hux’s jaw as he tried to draw him in, Hux slapped him, open palmed and deliberately aimed at his wounded cheek. Ren swayed back but he took it, his head turned to the side, his mouth twisted.

“You want this too,” he said. His voice tight like he was trying not to cry, “I can feel it, you want--”

Hux slapped him again, this time hard enough to re-open the cut on his lip. 

“You stupid, arrogant boy,” he hissed, “You rotten,  _ vile  _ little creature.”

Ren was cowed; he kept his head down, his eyes averted. They were wet with unspent tears now, but Hux didn’t miss the way his tongue probed at the bloodied split, or how his lashes fluttered at the pain of it. Hux thought he would crawl out of his own skin with the shudder of disgust that ran through him.

“So that’s why you’re here. Of course it is,” he said with a bark of sardonic laughter. He turned away from Ren, stubbed out what was left of his cigarette in the ashtray. He could feel the weight of his expectant gaze on him, waiting for instruction, hoping for punishment. He took it so very well, but that’s all he ever did - take, and take, and take. Ren had never given him anything but trouble. 

“Do you even care?” Hux asked, turning back to him again, “About the man-hours wasted looking for you? About the resources spent? About--”

_ \--me?  _

Hux set his jaw, pressed his tongue against his teeth. He had never wanted those depths of feelings, was repulsed by him, and somehow it still cut him to the bone. He didn’t like the subtle shift in Ren’s expression - he had pushed him out of his head, but he couldn’t stop how he felt leaking out of him like blood between his fingers as he put pressure on the wound. 

“You didn’t miss me. You missed-- this,” he said, a short gesture between them. Ren wanted the whip and not the hand that held it - not that it was any surprise to Hux; both Ren and Snoke had taken great care to make sure he never forgot he was utterly replaceable in their arrangement, but the knowledge didn’t make it any more palatable. It had suited him, back when he could convince himself he had the real power all along if he wanted to, but in the end it mattered little; Kylo left and he floundered. 

Their one-sided exchange continued, Ren’s expression solemn bordering on sullen like he was waiting for Hux to have his  _ moment _ and be done with it. The scrapes and scars, the bruising and the down-turned mouth all only served to accentuate his uncommon beauty, so full of expression even when he was passive. Hux tried to keep his own deliberately blank, wanted to be as cold and unreadable as stone under Ren’s quiet scrutiny. He looked away despite himself.

“This will be the last time,” he said. He looked back to Ren, “Do you understand? Never again.”

Ren held his gaze for a long moment before he agreed with a slight incline of his head. 

“Go,” Hux said; he pointed to the doorway of his bedroom, not the entrance to his quarters. He followed behind Ren, tried to crystallize the frustration and the hurt into something he could use, something he could wield like a weapon. He watched as Ren began to undress himself, his movements stiff but the actions familiar; he was obviously in great discomfort but they had done this so many times  - too many times - for it to not come naturally. 

Hux took note of each new injury as it was revealed to him; there were no cauterised slashes, so whatever had happened, the scavenger girl likely hadn’t been involved. The worst of it was a nebula of bruises that ran along his entire side, yellows fading into purples down his ribs and over his kidney. Combined with the abrasion on his face and further bruising on his arm and thigh, Hux would have guessed he’d either been dropped off of something on thrown into something with considerable force.

It also became very apparent to him that he had not received any medical attention for it, not so much as a bacta patch. Ren had came straight from his ship to Hux’s room, no medbay, no personal quarters. Punishment superseded healing - or, more likely, punishment was the healing. Hux ghosted his hand along Ren’s side and then jabbed his knuckles into the darkest part of the bruise with enough force to make him grunt in pain and twist away.

“Don’t just stand there like a gawping like a bantha, get on the bed,” he said, “Hands and knees.”

Ren arranged himself as instructed; his feet hung off the edge of the bed and he kept his head low, his hair mostly obscuring his face. As he carefully rolled up his shirt sleeves, Hux was struck by the urge to touch, to explore, to find all the places he was hurt and all the places he wasn’t. He resisted, of course; his hands went to his belt and not the acres of steely skin on offer. Ren was already half-hard, his cock dark and heavy between his legs. He lifted his head when he heard the whisper of Hux’s belt being pulled free from the loops that held it.

Hux had a custom pistol, one built to the exact specifications of his hand that would not fire with any finger but his on the trigger; somehow the supple black leather he wound round his fist felt so much more like it was made for him.

The first strike hit the sensitive skin at the crease between thigh and buttock, making Ren jerk forward with a soft grunt of surprise. He tried to straighten his back, to hold himself firm.

“Thank you, General,” he said quietly, making Hux pause as he wound up for the next strike.

“No,” he said, laced with acid as he brought it down with more force than necessary, “We are not doing that. Not tonight.”

The way Ren’s fingers tightened in the perfect sheets of his bed should have made Hux stop, but he didn’t; the next strike found its mark perfectly across the meat of his ass, as did the next, and the next. There was no grand performance, no posturing: Ren wanted to hurt. Hux wanted to hurt him. He had felt bad about it once upon a time, when he had taken it too far and Ren had let him. How quickly such a feeling was forgotten. 

Still, there was something ugly about it, in the heaviness of his blows and tension that wouldn’t leave Ren’s shoulders. He jerked with each hit like he hadn't been expecting it, and despite it all, the way his body tensed and shifted in discomfort was still so beautiful. At one point, he pushed his hips back and his head lower, and the next lash across his thighs accidentally clipped his heavy, flushed sack. Ren’s arm’s nearly gave out from under him; his squeal of pain was unbecoming for a man of his stature, and he fumbled to fold himself back into a safer position, knees together, hips pushed forward like a dog cowering with its tail between its legs. Hux caught him by the ankle and yanked with no small degree of violence, forcing him to spread his legs again. He dug his thumb into the hollow of Ren’s ankle, a warning to stay still. He swung again, deliberately aiming for the most delicate part of him, but this time Ren could only wail. He said Hux’s name once, twice; Hux almost missed it beneath the slap of the leather. When Ren didn’t say anything more, he stayed his hand and surveyed the damage he’d done. 

Red welts laddered their way from the middle of his thighs up to the small of his back from misswings where Hux had been far more careless than usual in his coveted violence. His sack was an unhappy shade of mauve, and sure to bruise. Even so, Ren was still hard, still flush-faced and dark eyed when he turned his head to see why Hux had stopped. Hux ran his hand over the abused skin, so hot to the touch, let it glide down between his legs.

“You failed, didn’t you,” he said, as if the thought had only just occurred to him, “All this trouble, all this  _ shit _ \- and you didn’t even succeed.”

He let his fingers brush over Ren’s sack, his hard cock, giving just the faintest hint of satisfaction that made the knight groan. Hux would be lying if he said he wasn’t affected too, his own arousal straining against the stiff wool of his britches. He had the self-control, and perhaps sense self-preservation to ignore it.

“How can you stand being you,” Hux went on; he gave Ren’s cock a vicious squeeze to emphasise his point, and he didn’t know if the half-cut keening moan was from that or the words themselves, “All the power in the universe, handed to you on a silver platter - and all you can do with it is fail, again and again. Is that why you come to me? You can’t hate yourself enough? Utterly pathetic.”

This was his own catharsis, more than any beating; the freedom to say all the sharp-edged, mean-spirited things he wanted to, all the needled barbs that he kept complacently under his tongue. He knew if he spat them out anywhere else on the Finaliser, Ren wouldn’t hesitate to run him through with that ridiculous sparking sabre of his. He was, after all, that replaceable.

With his free hand, Hux took Ren’s sack in his palm; with the other, he continued stroking his cock, a downward motion with a twist of his wrist, grip too tight to be comfortable. Ren’s hips rocked shamelessly with each stroke, and even from the angle at which he stood, Hux could see his mouth was open, lips slack despite the pain or indeed because of it. He was leaking already, Hux’s fingers were slick with it, so he increased his pace, increased his pressure. The pathetic noises Ren was making meant he was close, and Hux was almost tempted to let go, to leave him unfulfilled and suffering, but he wanted it to be over. Wanted it to be done. Let it be the meek and milky end to their arrangement. 

“Do it,” he urged, his voice barely more than a whisper, throat tight, knuckles white, “ _ Do it _ .”

That was all it took for Ren to fall apart. He came hot and fast over Hux’s fingers, making a mess of his thighs and the bedsheets too. Hux immediately released him, not wanting to touch him for longer than he had too; the noise Ren made at the loss was wounded. He sagged down into the sheets, his face pushed into the crook of his elbow. Hux stood over him, watched him tremble and weighed the strange sense of disappointment in the palm of his mind like a stone. It was anticlimactic, in a sense; part of him felt as though it should have ended in flames, some dramatic and all consuming, something that would leave its mark on both of them. The other part of him wiped his hand on the back of Ren’s thighs, then again on the bedsheet when he felt he still wasn’t clean enough. 

He turned, wandered from the bedroom into the living room and over to his table. He fished out a cigarette from the faithful silver box and caught it between his dry lips. It hung there for a moment as he glanced over his shoulder; for a second, he thought Ren had followed him, the phantom pressure of fingers on the small of his back. He frowned, turned back, lit the cigarette and inhaled. 

He stood like that for a long moment facing the wall and a future more uncertain than he cared for. His chest felt too big, too empty, like it would collapse in on itself at any moment, like all the breath in the world couldn’t fill it. There was a cold sweat on his brow that made him shiver despite his flushed face. He tapped the ash into the ashtray, and then on second thought picked it up and took it with him back to the bedroom. Ren was still lying where Hux had left him, face down with his arms cushioning his head. He might have been looking at Hux but he could tell because his hair was in the way. 

“You did call for me,” he said when Hux sat on the edge of the bed, ashtray in lap, mind elsewhere. His brows dipped at the statement but he didn’t respond, “You said you didn’t, but I could feel you. Reaching out for me. Pulling me back like a homing beacon.”

This time the hand on his back was warm, and solid, and tremulous. Hux rolled his cigarette between his fingers as he contemplated the glowing cherry. Then, with little ceremony, twisted and jabbed it into the web of skin between Ren’s thumb and forefinger until he snatched the offending limb away again. He would never touch him again.

“Next time-” Hux began as he fished his lighter from his pocket, because there would always be a next time, even if it wouldn’t be like  _ this _ it would be something- “Just stay gone.”


End file.
